Did the fourth richest human just tease plans to colonise the Moon?

Why Blue Origin’s big New Glenn rocket might fly, and what it means for spaceflight.

We can say this much for Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin—he does not lack ambition. First Bezos founded an online bookstore that became the largest retailer in the western world, and now he plans to self-fund a New Glenn rocket that is nearly as tall as the Saturn V launch vehicle and more than half as powerful.

Further Reading

As wild as Bezos' idea sounds, Blue Origin might be able to get the job done. And if Bezos and Blue Origin can fly their massive orbital rocket in the next three to four years, it would be a remarkable, unprecedented achievement in a number of ways that could radically remake spaceflight.

Proof of concept

First, a few words about why this might really be viable. It is true that all Blue Origin has flown so far is a propulsion module, powered by a single BE-3 engine, and a capsule on a suborbital flight. The company's New Shepard spacecraft is designed to carry six passengers on 10- to 15-minute hops up to about 100km before bringing them back down to Earth. This is not dissimilar to the first Mercury flights in the early 1960s, hence the moniker New Shepard, named after pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard.

But as simple as the New Shepard system appears, everything in it is designed to scale into New Glenn. The rockets are shaped similarly. The BE-4 engine is a progression from the reusable BE-3 engine. Both New Shepard and New Glenn are designed to have a flight life of at least 25 missions. And here’s the crazy thing about Bezos—he thinks the bigger New Glenn rocket will be easier to land.

"The reason I like vertical landing is because it scales so well," he explained earlier this year. "New Shepard is about 80 feet tall. It's the shortest vehicle we will ever make. It gets easier to land the vehicles the bigger they get. It's the inverted pendulum problem. It's easier to balance bigger things. I like those architectures. Parachutes have the opposite problem; as things get bigger, it's very difficult. You can't build a parachute 1,000 feet in diameter. Even wings, they scale pretty well to a certain size, but they end up being a lot of dead weight to carry."

Further Reading

The bottom line: New Shepard may be small, but because Blue Origin has launched and landed the same rocket four times now, there is reason to believe an orbital rocket based upon the same concepts writ large just might work. New Shepard is the test bed, the proof of concept. So far it has worked nearly flawlessly.

Self-funded

Bezos is worth in excess of $60 billion, which makes him the third or fourth richest person in the world, depending upon the value of Amazon’s stock. Although he has not publicly disclosed his investment in Blue Origin since 2014, it likely now exceeds $1 billion. That small (for someone with his resources) investment has funded the company for 16 years and led to the development of four generations of engines, including the BE-4. Its impressive 550,000 pounds of thrust power the orbital rocket.

SpaceX and Elon Musk deserve credit for shaking up the aerospace industry with lower-cost rockets and reusability, but SpaceX has not been largely self-funded. A majority of its revenues have come from NASA. Multibillion dollar contracts have allowed SpaceX to develop the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. Blue Origin, on the other hand, has received a scant $25.7 million from NASA as part of the early stages of the commercial crew program.

Enlarge/ The New Shepard propulsion module makes its fourth landing in June.

Blue Origin

Bezos is under no pressure from investors to rush development, and he is under no pressure from customers to promise a certain delivery date. The success of his vehicle is neither reliant on winning a contract from NASA nor a subcontract from one of the big aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin or Boeing. New Glenn is solely dependent upon the ambition of Bezos and his willingness to fund the project, which seems ample.

"I'm perfectly willing to fund this for as long as is required," he said earlier this year. "There are way easier ways to make money. You don't go through the list of best risk-return possibilities and find spaceflight. That's not it. The reason you do this is because you're a missionary for this. You're passionate about it."

Ambitions

Rumors circulate of Bezos stepping back from his chief executive role at Amazon. He wants to spend more than the one day a week he works on Blue Origin. This indicates his passion in the future will be focused on spaceflight rather than commerce. He has always been fascinated by space travel, of course. Now he has the money to fulfill those interests.

Bezos reiterated Blue Origin's goal in an e-mail today: "Our vision is millions of people living and working in space." And although he may have started small with his proof-of-concept vehicle, New Shepard, the scope of New Glenn reveals that Bezos is really, really serious about spaceflight. For his orbital rocket, he could have chosen a launch vehicle based on one or two BE-4 engines, which would have been powerful enough to launch satellites into low-Earth orbit. This would have marked an incremental step toward bigger ambitions. Instead, he went for seven engines and 3.85 million pounds of thrust, nearly twice as powerful as any rocket flying today. Put another way, Blue Origin wants to go from a small, suborbital rocket to one that stands four times as tall and possesses 35 times the thrust. That is quite a leap.

Further Reading

Beyond an orbital rocket, when I had a chance to speak with Bezos earlier this year, he did not specify a plan about how millions of people will live and work in space once they get there. But it's clear he believes they will have to live off the land, be it the Moon, asteroids, or worlds beyond. "I think we have a lot of time to figure that out," Bezos said. "My view is you make plans for the near future, and you develop scenarios for the longer term, because so many things will change between now and then it doesn't make sense to make detailed plans for things like how you're going to do harvesting of resources from near-Earth objects. You want to think about those things, you want to develop scenarios, but you don't need to go all the way to a planning stage.”

"Near-Earth objects" is an interesting choice of words. We can further glean some of his intentions from the name for the next rocket beyond New Glenn, which will be called New Armstrong. If New Shepard’s namesake Alan Shepard made America's first suborbital flight and John Glenn made the first orbital flight, well, we all know what Neil Armstrong did. On Monday morning, will the fourth richest person in the world tease plans to mine or perhaps even colonize the Moon?

All available evidence suggests he is serious. We watch eagerly to see whether he succeeds.